This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

In Lesson 3, you learned that metadata can come from the camera, or it can be entered manually in the form of keywords, captions,
ratings, and so on. Those types of metadata are great for identifying when and how the photo was taken. But how can you precisely
determine where a photo was taken or who is in the photo? You could take scrupulous notes while shooting...yeah, me neither.
Thankfully, there are easy and engaging ways in which Aperture can help you.

In this lesson, you’ll examine two features that first appeared in iPhoto but have grown considerably more sophisticated in
Aperture 3: Faces and Places provide a very natural way to index photos. Faces is a feature that not only detects faces of people in your photos, but with some minor assistance from you it can also recognize those people. The second feature,
Places, uses GPS data to identify where photos were taken.

Because this lesson covers iPhoto features that have migrated to Aperture, we’ll also explore migrating your iPhoto library
to Aperture.

Moving from iPhoto to Aperture

For many iPhoto users, switching to Aperture is a natural progression. Aperture includes almost all the fun and elegant features
of iPhoto while adding more comprehensive image management, editing, and output capabilities. You can make the move from iPhoto
to Aperture in one of two ways: You can move your entire library at once, or you can selectively move Events, albums, or individual
photos.

Browsing an iPhoto Library

Aperture includes an iPhoto Browser to preview and import images, albums, or Events. The iPhoto Browser is a handy way to
look at your iPhoto images without importing the entire library.

To open the iPhoto Browser:

Choose File > Import > Show iPhoto Browser, or press Option-I.

Double-click the Tasmania iPhoto Event to see the contents of the Event.

As in Aperture, in the iPhoto Browser, you can slowly position the mouse pointer over an Event to quickly preview its contents.
You can view larger image previews by dragging the slider at the bottom of the Browser window.

The iPhoto Browser lets you view your photos and events as a grid. When you click an Event, you can also display the images
in a list or detailed view.

Whether you’re importing an entire Event or just a single image, you can select the image or Event and drag it into the Aperture
library, which creates a new project. Dropping an item onto an existing Aperture project imports the item to that project.

In the next exercise, however, you want to import all the images from your iPhoto library, so let’s look at an alternative
way to do that.

NOTE

If you Command-Option-drag images from the iPhoto Browser, Aperture will import them as referenced images. You’ll learn more
about referenced images in Lesson 5.

Migrating an Entire iPhoto Library

Because Aperture and iPhoto are both Apple applications, they are designed to share information. For example, albums that
you organized in iPhoto will seamlessly become Aperture albums with the same structure. The EXIF data, keywords, ratings,
flags, and any applied adjustments will be maintained.

To import an entire iPhoto library:

Choose File > Import > iPhoto Library.

Aperture automatically navigates to the location of your current iPhoto library on your hard disk. In the Import window, some
of the same Import Browser settings are available, such as the master file name and where to store files. The least complicated
way to import an iPhoto library is to store the photos in the Aperture library.

If you choose “In their current location,” your images are imported as referenced images, which will leave the files in iPhoto
and link them to Aperture. Because the files are linked and not copied, using referenced images can save disk space, but managing
iPhoto-referenced images in Aperture can become confusing unless you are very organized. You’ll learn more about referenced
images in Lesson 5.

Click Import to add the images to your Aperture library.

After the import process is complete, click OK on the dialog that confirms the number of images you have imported.

NOTE

By default, importing images from your iPhoto library into your Aperture library copies the files. You end up with two master
images: one in your Aperture library and one in your iPhoto library. This can double the amount of disk space each copied
image uses on your Mac. After importing your iPhoto images, you can choose to delete your images from iPhoto.